page_title: Abbott Pattison
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Abbott Pattison / Life
caption_attribution_description: English: The sculptor carving FAMILY GROUP Lincolnville, Maine, 1958.
context_page_description: Abbott Lawrence Pattison was an American sculptor and abstract artist.
context_section_description: INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN as a sculptor, American artist Abbott Pattison worked primarily in cast bronze, welded brass and carved marble. Recognition of his talent first came in his hometown of Chicago through representation by the Fairweather-Hardin Gallery, but his reputation soon spread nationally, with eight one-man exhibits in New York City at The Downtown Gallery and Edith Halpern Gallery. Later he was also represented in Los Angeles by The Feingarten Gallery, and in London by The Alwin Gallery.
  Abbott Pattison was born May 15, 1916 to William and Bonnie Pattison, the second of seven children. His father was a well-known real estate developer of the city. He first attended art classes at The Art Institute of Chicago at the age of 10, while a student of Francis Parker School. Later he chose to enroll at Yale University because of their art program. While there, he was thoroughly trained in classical traditions of drawing, fresco painting and the Sienese style of egg tempera, eventually choosing sculpture as his primary art form.
  After he graduated with a Liberal Arts Degree in 1937, he enrolled in the Master’s program at Yale, and graduated with a Degree in Fine Arts in 1939.  Among the fifty-two students who graduated from the art/architecture department that year, Pattison was awarded first prize, which was a traveling fellowship, and he chose to travel to Northern China and Japan for six months. While in China, he lived in a mountain village 150 miles from Peking with a Franciscan priest who was building a Catholic church in stone quarried from a nearby mountain, Pattison carved Twelve Stations of the Cross for the monastery with the assistance of several local stone masons. Next traveling in Japan, Abbott Pattison was arrested as a spy, but soon released. He warned his interrogators that he would return to Japan, but the next time he would be wearing a uniform.
  Upon his return to The United States in 1940, Pattison went directly into Officer’s Training School. From 1942 to 1945, he was given active command as Captain of a Pacific Command Sub Chaser, doing convoy duty between Hawaii and the Midway Islands. He was promoted to First Executive Officer on a Destroyer Escort, and was thereafter given full command as Captain of a second Destroyer Escort, running convoys across the Pacific from Florida to the African Coast and into the Mediterranean. He won a Military Merit medal for personal bravery, and his ship received battle stars for downing several German fighter planes. Pattison noted that the only regular paycheck he ever received was from that time when he served as an officer in the United States Navy. 
  At the end of World War II, Abbott Pattison returned to Chicago, and to his art, so that by 1946 he was well-known in art circles as the youthful recipient of both the Logan and Eisendrath awards, and as a recipient of one of the four prizes awarded nationally to sculptors by The Metropolitan Museum. He joined the faculty of The Art Institute of Chicago as an instructor of sculpture.
  In 1953, Pattison was a visiting sculptor at The University of Georgia, and was asked to return the following year as a sculptor in residence with no teaching duties, having been honored for a second time with the Pauline Palmer Prize for sculpture. At the University, Pattison carved a large marble sculpture, titled Mother and Child and went on to create a 12-foot high abstract horse for the campus in welded plate steel, now called familiarly The Iron Horse. At the time, this sculpture represented the cutting-edge of avant-garde art in the United States. The sculpture was placed in front of the dormitory of the University’s football team, and angry students attacked the horse with spray paint, manure, fire and hammers, with the art department professors merely looking on. The Athens, Georgia police force was called in to quell the disturbance. This event became famous as the first official riot on an American college campus, and became the feature of a Public Broadcasting System movie special. The quarter-inch thick boiler plate steel
caption: The sculptor carving FAMILY GROUP Lincolnville, Maine, 1958.
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